Site Flipping Experiment
Posted 30th July 2009 at 09:59 AM by Roger Mayne
Tags sell website, site flipping
I recently (Feb 09) built my first ever "to flip" site as a bit of an experiment.
I purchsed the domain at www.namecheap.com for $8.88, added it to my hosting, then installed a basic Wordpress configuration.
I uploaded a few plugins...
All this took about an hour of real time, I guess. I had already spent a very short amount of time researching some keywords and phrases.
I used the Flexibillity Theme for the blog and customised the look and feel.
I then asked a fellow Warrior to write 5 articles for me, costing $25. Once those were written, I added them to the blog one by one over a period of a few weeks.
I added Adsense to the theme and Google Analytics.
I registered the blog with some blog directories
I had a PLR ebook package, which I added to the blog.
I was then offered a free PLR package of about 8 ebooks related to this niche. I added all those to the blog.
I kept checking the site rankings, and added some comments on related blogs.
I then commissioned another 5 articles, again costing $25. Each article was drip fed manually to the blog over a few weeks.
More comments added. Bookmarked the site with Stumbleupon and Digg. I am new to social bookmarking, so learned a bit about this on the way
The site started to get traffic slowly, until it was at the point of about 200+ per month. No great wave of visitors, but at least the site was getting noticed.
I then listed the site on Flippa.com (cost - $19) for 30 days with starting bid of $50 and BIN of $250. Within about a week, accepted the full BIN
Fees to Flippa = $6
Total cost of project = $83.88
Profit = $166.12
Total time taken to achieve sale (in terms of my own time) probably about 2 days.
Although the experiment was profitable, I don't think the return was high enough to justify the time and effort, although I learned new promotion methods along the way.
I don't think I'll be using site flipping as part of my overall business plan, I'll leave that to the flipping experts.
I purchsed the domain at www.namecheap.com for $8.88, added it to my hosting, then installed a basic Wordpress configuration.
I uploaded a few plugins...
- All-in-one SEO
- Sociable
- Google XML Sitemaps
All this took about an hour of real time, I guess. I had already spent a very short amount of time researching some keywords and phrases.
I used the Flexibillity Theme for the blog and customised the look and feel.
I then asked a fellow Warrior to write 5 articles for me, costing $25. Once those were written, I added them to the blog one by one over a period of a few weeks.
I added Adsense to the theme and Google Analytics.
I registered the blog with some blog directories
- BlogCatalog
- MyBlogLog
- Bloglisting
I had a PLR ebook package, which I added to the blog.
I was then offered a free PLR package of about 8 ebooks related to this niche. I added all those to the blog.
I kept checking the site rankings, and added some comments on related blogs.
I then commissioned another 5 articles, again costing $25. Each article was drip fed manually to the blog over a few weeks.
More comments added. Bookmarked the site with Stumbleupon and Digg. I am new to social bookmarking, so learned a bit about this on the way
The site started to get traffic slowly, until it was at the point of about 200+ per month. No great wave of visitors, but at least the site was getting noticed.
I then listed the site on Flippa.com (cost - $19) for 30 days with starting bid of $50 and BIN of $250. Within about a week, accepted the full BIN
Fees to Flippa = $6
Total cost of project = $83.88
Profit = $166.12
Total time taken to achieve sale (in terms of my own time) probably about 2 days.
Although the experiment was profitable, I don't think the return was high enough to justify the time and effort, although I learned new promotion methods along the way.
I don't think I'll be using site flipping as part of my overall business plan, I'll leave that to the flipping experts.
Total Comments 2
Comments
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I found this interesting, and you're right, to promote a website for traffic is very time consuming but you did all the right things. Multiplication would make this more profitable, doing several sites at once, perhaps, but still, it's very labor intensive. No easy way, unless someone just happens on to a domain name that snaps!Posted 1st August 2009 at 10:29 AM by MarisueWrites
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Thanks for the comment, Marisue. I agree about multiplication, but to be honest, at this level, I don't want to make this my main source of income. As the title suggests, it was just an experiment. It was enjoyable, though, and I learnt some new marketing aspects.Posted 7th August 2009 at 02:19 AM by Roger Mayne
